History in the bash shell is an awesome thing but .. dayum .. it saves everything. Do you really need every 'clear', 'ls' and 'exit'?

You know you don't.

With this you have a variable that suppresses duplicate commands, 'ls', 'clear' and the shell built-ins bg, fg, and exit:# cat $HOME/.bash_profile | grep HISTIGNOREexport HISTIGNORE="&:ls:clear:[bf]g:exit"

He (Patton) rammed a submachine gun into the belly of a soldier collapsed from exhaustion on a North African beach, waking him suddenly to his explanation.

I know you're tired. We're all tired. That makes no difference. The next beach you land on will be defended by Germans. I don't want one of them coming up behind you and hitting you over the head with a sockful of shit.

That "sockful of shit" brought reality home more certainly than any other weapon he could have mentioned.

You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain't keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and arcane as regular expressions. I'm not sure how that works. But it does. Regular expressions rock.They should absolutely be a key part of every modern coder's toolkit.

Okay, fine. I've used regular expressions, but not a whole bunch. I'm not even a coder but I can use them for my job. I should really get down and dirty with them.

The author comments that [this] somewhat pushes the limits of what it is sensible to do with regular expressions, to which I respond: somewhat? This is a 6,343 character pattern. How many more characters does it take to reach the limit of sensibility? It's abusive. I pity the poor developer who has to troubleshoot this behemoth.

Me, I wonder at the mind that could produce something like that without clapping a grenade to the side of his head.

1. You run up to the bad guy while screaming your ass off (presumably so the bad guy will think you are nuts) and carrying your rifle with, “fixed bayonet,” in front of you at a forty-five degree angle (the “on guard” position).

2. When you reach the bad guy, you swing your right foot towards him while simultaneously thrusting the butt of the rifle upward into the bottom of his chin (the goal being to knock his head off).

3. With the rifle now shoulder high (and if the bad guy is still standing), you cross your left leg in front of your right leg while thrusting the butt of the rifle horizontally and forward aiming at the bad guy’s face (this should definitely knock the bad guy down).

4. You now bring your right forward while slashing the bad guy with the bayonet aiming to cut a line from the right side of his throat to his left groin (by now, the bad guy had better be on his back).

5. You now bring your left leg forward while simultaneously thrusting the bayonet into the bad guy’s chest.

It's a heckuva cardio workout. I wonder if the folks at my gym would consider a class on Saturday involving bayonet dummies and M16s . . .

Dumbass then publishes a correction revealing he's tone deaf with respect to his own sense of humor.

Update, 4 p.m. EDT: At the request of several readers, I should clarify that while there's no such term as "rifle-whipping," it's fairly common to use rifle butts as a club. The term of art is the misleadingly pornographic phrase "butt stroking," the butt in this instance referring to the flat end of a rifle. It would be far preferable to call this activity "rifle-whipping," but that term has virtually no currency.

Because 'whip' has absolutely nosexualovertones whatsoever. Nope, and you're a perv if you think so.

Calling it 'art' is lame: smashing the butt end of a seven pound rifle into a fellow's jaw and face is a violent act; the goal is to kill the guy. Done right he's on the ground with a fucking knife in his gut. Done slightly wrong he's got the knife stuck in his ribs. Then the attacker has to wiggle it around to get it out, which makes things really gross. By this time the guy on the ground is also doing a lot of screaming and bleeding and so forth, which would add a really disturbing tone to the proceedings.

My instructor said it would be easier at that point to discharge a round in his chest. Which would, yes, free the rifle. It would also make an incredible mess.

Yes, we all wondered why, if we had a round in the chamber, we were screwing around with a bayonet. I don't recall that he had a good answer for that.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

In the middle of the Darby century came the important decision of Miller v. Race. Surprisingly, no copy of this case is to be found online save in the syllabus of Professor Gregory Maggs. So with his permission I've appended his edited version of the case (with some additional very minor edits of my own) below.

We may be seeing only the first stages of a switch from floating currencies, which may be proving to be unworkable, to commodity-backed currencies. Floating currencies were and are a great historical experiment, and there is no guarantee that such experiments will work out in the long run. By serving monetary functions such as stores of value and hedges against currency-denominated debt, commodity index ETFs and ETNs are starting to serve as monetary substitutes.

That's tricky - it's a great big ol' diverse country. What's merely tacky in San Francisco (lotsa average looking nekkid people at the link - you have been warned)is going to get you a ticket, jail and rode out on a rail in my home town.

In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

Well that's about - pardon my simplicity - damned dumb. People do a lot of stuff in private they'd rather not see in the community - that's why they do it inside.

Why ... what's this? It's a server that has had it's RAM upgraded from 4GB to 8GB.

Stats at one day view.

Stats at the three day view.

The vertical gray line is the period the server was down. Note the vast improvement across the board after the installation. Yes, you can't see the gray 'outage' bar in the bottom graphic - but you can tell where it is by the way the Evil Red colors fall off the cliff.

It's the simple things, done well and in a timely fashion in the broad light of day that make the job a fun one.

Windows update, the way Windows stacks garbage under the Add/Remove Software dialog,the utter failure that is the search function at microsoft.com,[1] Mr. Gates had the same usability experience that the rest of us poor saps have.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

Rockin'. I especially liked this comment from anonymous

The Steve Jobs version:

"If the MovieMaker download site isn't working by tomorrow at 6 am I will come down there at 6:01 am an choke the living ___ out of all of you."

Sometimes, brevity is enough.

[1] Someone has probably clued Bill in that the optimal way to find what you're looking for at microsoft.com is to use Google.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I hate this job; toc bitch, S-3, Operations Officer, whatever you want to call it. I've done it everywhere from Kuwait to Kosovo and all points in between. It's a job where the boss is never happy with you, and the people who actually need your products never get them in a timely manner because a font is wrong, or a slide isn't formatted properly. Worse still, the end users never provide good feedback to tell you when your products help, how to improve to better help them, or when you are 90 degrees off true.

Lesse - I spent half my time in the service working for various '6 shops that share the same woes Chuck writes about: when the coms are bad, no one is happy. When the coms are good and the bits are flying to and fro, you're just doing your job.

For that matter, I've been a system admin for over a dozen years after I left the service - same issue. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment - but there are compensations.

Organizations that depend on the web will die if their site crashes and they don’t recover. The longer the outage, the worse the damage often is. The same kind of Operations culture is required to effectively respond to, recover from, and prevent outages.

While this seems obvious for many people with years of experience working on the web, it is a significant and often difficult shift for those in the mainstream. This seems particularly true for executives who think of Web Operations as an extension of corporate IT. This gap becomes especially painful when people accustomed to traditional “command-and-control” management styles and models try to apply it to this new type of organization.

The CEO cannot shout or fire the website back up. The CFO cannot account, control, or audit the website back up and the Chief Counsel cannot sue it back to life. The CMO, if there is one, and their entire marketing & PR team will not spin a website back online. The CIO or CTO probably can’t recover the site either, at least not very quickly. The fate of the company frequently and acutely rests in the hands of engineers who do Web Operations.

No, not fire-fighting - putting out fires is the least rewarding aspect of the job. Barring acts-of-God, most fire-fighting happens because someone took their eye of the ball, ignored the warning lighs, failed to tighten a nut. All fire-fighting gets you is grumpy and tired and you snap at your kids in the morning when you finally get home.

Naw - it's the simple things, done well and in a timely fashion in the broad light of day that make the job a fun one.

That and I'm not sitting in the woods for the summer a thousand miles from hearth and home dealing with fug heads.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

He's a Colonel in the Air Force. He's the CO of an Air Force base. More than 2,000 hours in the F-15E and F-111D. He's been The Man at a fighter squadron. Spent a year at the Naval War College. Been on a staff position for Southern Watch, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. And so on.

No one can know the mind of another. However, this is the biography of a man who has his stuff wired together. He's about the last guy you'd expect to call - on a Sunday, no less - a guy who bosses a middlin' important peace organization.

I tried explaining to him that I have a lifetime of experience listening to people in the military say that we should ramp up Pentagon spending. He was not in a mood to listen.

Instead the Colonel's voice escalated, similar to his desire to see the military budget take ascendancy over social progress in America. "I can see that you are not one who should be involved in deciding on our nation's priorities," he yelled at me. Then he hung up.

"Damn peacenik Hippies ...."

Sounds like a bunch of horse apples to me. It's so pat, so perfect, so exactly what a stereotypical war fighter is in all those cheesy Hollywood films. I suspect ...

Colonel Suminsby has lost his mind - he's probably mumbling about bodily essences in his office.

# cheat into_the_codesnip Gone is the calm, mathematical world. The clear, clean methedrine high is over. The whole endeavor has become a struggle against disorder. A battle of wills. A testing of endurance. Requirements muddle up; changes are needed immediately. Meanwhile, no one has changed the system deadline. The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow post-it notes everywhere; the white boards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

Soon the programmer has no choice but to retreat into some private interior space, closer to the machine, where things can be accomplished. The machine begins to seem friendlier than the analysts, the users, the managers. The real-world reflection of the program -- who cares anymore? Guide an X-ray machine or target a missile; print a budget or a dossier; run a city subway or a disk-drive read/write arm: it all begins to blur. The system has crossed the membrane -- the great filter of logic, instruction by instruction -- where it has been cleansed of its linkages to actual human life.

The goal now is not whatever all the analysts first set out to do; the goal becomes the creation of the system itself. Any ethics or morals or second thoughts, any questions or muddles or exceptions, all dissolve into a junky Nike-mind: Just do it. If I just sit here and code, you think, I can make something run. When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run the program. Show them: Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs. Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words and what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational system. Talk all you want, but this thing here: it works.

Originally, the idea was to look at how much energy it takes to make and use a styrofoam cup versus a ceramic mug - especially once washing costs over the lifetime of the mug have been factored in. After doing some research, however, I found that at least two similar studies have already been done - first in 1994 and again in 2007. Shocking as it is to some environmentalists, both studies found that styrofoam cups use less energy over their 1-use lifetime than ceramic cups do over their 500 - 3000 use lifetime.

You can, of course, simply not wash your ceramic mug [1] but this is probably sub-optimal in the setting Joseph is working in (facilities management) so .. washing is going to be a factor.

Somehow we've got it stuck on our collective brain-housing group that disposable must always equal bad.

[1] I had a staff sergeant instructor at COBOL school who had a precious ceramic mug. The mug had a horde of fornicating cartoon cows. He never washed the cup - claimed it washed all the taste out, and that coffee would kill any bacteria that accumulated overnight.

One of his fellow instructors played a horrible practical joke - they washed his cup. He was seriously out of sorts for the rest of the week - and by 'out of sorts' I mean fits of irrational anger that only nicotine addicts going cold turkey know about.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Just relax - Congress .. is .. on .. the .. job. Hell, Democrats in Congress want to make a damn windmill car, the Republicans in there want to run cars on the pelts of endangered species, by the time they get finished trying to fix all this mess windshield wiper fluid will cost more than gas does today.

Reading Scottish history up to a certain point makes you slap your hand to your forehead because every time anybody went and finally secured themselves the Scottish throne, somebody else wanted it. Whoever that was usually went to the English monarch looking for help, which that dude would gladly give, in exchange for allegiance. Welp, there goes the neighborhood.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

My oldest daughter watched the Monkeys so my wife and I could 'steel away' for two nights in scenic Door County.

My other daughter presented me with three coupons for lawn mowing 'without complaining or whining': Awesome.

The Monkeys gave me this picture [1] on a t-shirt.

[1] The deal here is that the Milwaukee Zoo has a troop of bonobos. The Monkeys were thrilled to discover that one of them was named Brian.

A psychiatric advisor provided help for Brian early on, suggesting that he get more one-on-one contact with other bonobos rather than try to integrate with the whole group. That strategy has worked, and Brian, now 15, can relate with several bonobos at a time.

A chimpanzee who would prefer to minimize his social interaction - that's my kind of primate. So they call me a bonobo (the word just rolls around in your mouth) and they're monkeys.

You need authentication for applications. Just gotta have it. Even utterly harmless internal applications that will never-ever-never see the internet need - in these benighted ages of Sarbanes-Oxley - authentication because if you don't some auditor about ten days out of college is going to gig you for it.

This might seem awkward but if you've got Ruby on your server it's no more awkward than using PERL. The database thing might be another problem. Except that with sqlite your database is a file and those can be mounted from an NFS drive. Or can you replicate a sqlite file from a central repository?

!! - Last command !foo - Run most recent command starting with 'foo...' (ex. !ps, !mysqladmin) !foo:p - Print command that !foo would run, and add it as the latest to command history !$ - Last 'word' of last command ('/path/to/file' in the command 'ls -lAFh /path/to/file', '-uroot' in 'mysql -uroot') !$:p - Print word that !$ would substitute !* - All but first word of last command ('-lAFh /path/to/file' in the command 'ls -lAFh /path/to/file', '-uroot' in 'mysql -uroot') !*:p - Print words that !* would substitute

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Two interesting papers from Jerry Pournelle. The former is the standard 'seize the high ground' jazz; if you're not convinced this is important then you're not reading history or you have a severe case of wishful thinking.

Spacepower today is similar to airpower in 1920: within 20 years space supremacy will be a decisive element of military victory on land or sea. The power that has access to space and can deny access to its enemy will have an advantage at least as great as air supremacy or sea supremacy.

We have institutions for nearly everything now, but we have lost the institutional means of long range planning. Who looks after our grandchildren? Surely not the politicians, who can hardly think past the next election, and are generally content to put problems off to be solved when the politician is safely out of office.

We no longer have great families planning for the future because we don’t have continuity of wealth: for good or ill, there is no entailment of property, and while there is talk of abolishing death taxes, they have pretty well done their egalitarian work; and perhaps this is a good thing. Good or ill, few think about the next generation and fewer try to do anything about it, because they have little confidence of continuity of their positions and fortunes.

The corporations are useless. The discounted value of a dollar in thirty years is effectively zero. A corporation that invested significantly in research with a thirty-year payoff would be involved in a hostile takeover not long afterwards.

That leaves government.

But Government Always Mucks Things Up

It isn’t strictly true that government always mucks things up, but it’s often enough so. A, if not the, major purpose of government is to extract money from non-government and use it to hire and pay government employees. This guarantees that government will always expand; and there inevitably comes a point at which the addition of people to a project has a negative impact. Almost all long-standing government agencies and projects have people who are worse than merely useless, they are in the way; and the more conscientious they are about earning their pay the more they tend to get in the gears and bring progress to a halt

If building a space-faring civilization were easy it would have already been done.

And one of the funniest ever stories in SF came from his daughter, Astrid [1]. She was taking a science fiction class and there was a quiz question: Why did Robert A. Heinlein write Stranger in a Strange Land?

She answered "For the money."

Teacher marked it wrong, she went up to see him. "Why did you mark this wrong?"

Teacher laughed. "Why did you answer it that way?"

She said, "Because he was at my house talking to my dad and I asked him why he wrote it and that's what he said ..."

Monday, June 16, 2008

About the Fourth Season, Episode 10 'Revelations' [1] .... sucks to be them. Oh, the look on Adama's face at the end of that episode!

We still don't know who the Fifth Cylon is.

A picture of Grace Park is always appropriate.

I'm just gassing but .. the fifth Cylon is Galactica herself.

Cylons are more advanced that anyone thought before the 12 Colonies were nuked. Skin jobs took the Colonials by complete surprise, and we seem to have had them around for at least 30 years.

Savior or Threat?

I submit that the Cylons were more advanced during the war than was commonly thought - skinjobs, perhaps, certainly other advanced weapons and technologies, like the Nazi superweapons - really advanced stuff that didn't quite reach the stage of doing them a bit of good. The skinjobs as deep cover agents - maybe they were able to own themselves a Colonial ship?

The worst part is .. Centurions like to channel surf.

And then when it was all over and humanity won by the skin of their teeth,the Fleet put that information under deep Need to Know and Hope That Doesn't Come Back to Bite Us.

Fast forward twenty years. Their sleeper agents are now senior officers in the fleet - they're getting ready to retire. A beached XO or Admiral isn't in a position to help or hurt anyone. And the last of the battlestars that fought in the war is being scrapped .. the Cylons have to act now or their deep-cover agents and owned machinery are gone.

Use it or loose it. Nuke 'm from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.

I love the smell of burning cities in the morning. It smells like .. victory.

This would not seem possible - Galactica has surely been in the yard for refit and SLEP: it's improbable that there is a Hybrid sitting in a bathtub behind a bulkhead.

But there was Starbuck's Viper that was gone over 'bolt by bolt' and it still could detect a beacon no other ship could. There is something goofy about electronics in the Galactica universe - if a fighter's electronics can see stuff that no one else can .. naw.

So .. I'm wrong. But as a theory I like it very much.

[1] Link to the Television Without Pity recaplet - and many spoilers there.

Me: Help me, help me, the application[1] restarted but the file viewer part didn't. My users can't use the viewer it crashes with a horrible error. Save me, Oracle!

Them: Golly. Nobody can view the files?

Me: Yup - it's a real pickle.

Them: Send me screen shots of the error message, your File Manager Configuration Page and we'll get right on that!

Me: You got it.

Days pass ....

Me; Hey, about that problem?

Them: Hunh? Oh ... yeah! Hey, I was looking at those screen shots. It's 'cause you're using Safari and the security model is different and never mind the part where you showed me the log files and the system errors and said "it's affecting everyone". Here is a tech note to read on how to fix the problem you don't have.

[1] So .. how you lik'n the tech support riffs? Getting old? 'Cause now that our BOM vendor is owned by Oracle, there's going to be a lot more of this and I can see it will get old, very quickly.

Just .. wow. Dresden Codak started off as just another web comic. Then it veered into a serious graphic novel:

Gradually, however, it has become a full-fledged graphic novel. Unique in uncountable details of art and presentation, but more unique than I think even its author realizes in its actual material. Dresden Codak Presents: Hob is a hard SF graphic novel about transhumanism, from a transhumanist perspective. Not the edges of transhumanism, the aftereffects or scottish-accented folks off on a distant hill, but the thing itself.

And what about Mr. McCain? Disaster. Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?

Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That’s what he tells us.Why would you doubt him? He’s a graduate of Annapolis. I know a lot of the Annapolis breed. Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.So what does that have to do with the U.S. Naval Academy down in Annapolis? The service universities keep track of each other, that’s all. They have views about each other. And they are very aware of social class and eventually money, since they usually marry it.

You, Mr. Gore, are no intellectual.

Bonus points for the snotty class-warfare reference! And also .. conspiracy!

Sunday, June 15, 2008

I had a dream yesterday where I received a gift. The gift was a toy from the Power Rangers / Transformers / Autobots realm - starts off as one thing, transforms into another, sports various beam and projectile launching technologies.

I was going over all of the fiddly details with the lady who gave me the gift: how the crew compartment would get squashed by the transform, the weapons all pointed forward in fixed mounts so to shoot off-axis you'd have to rotate the entire vehicle ... in the end we agreed this wasn't a serious fighting vehicle and had to be a command and control version.

If you hang out with people in the Veterans of Foreign wars or American Legion or Disabled American Veterans (I’m a member of all three) you find that they are not nearly as robotically Republican and warlike as they are often painted. They are often intelligent and think about things. But they want a candidate who is Like Them. They can spot a slick phony and if you run with one you aren’t doing yourself a favor.

(Webb) is Like Them (and like me). He is very heartland, Scots-Irish, and did not grow up drinking designer water. He saw a lot of heavy combat as a Marine in Viet Nam. People know it because they have read his book, Fields of Fire, which he actually wrote.

Fields of Fire is an excellent book.

He would be a splendid counterweight to McCain. On his war record, McCain is not a phony like Bush, Kerry, and Hillary the Sniper Dodger, but neither is Webb. I doubt that there exists a VFW post that would not be delighted to have him speak. If Hillary or Kerry came within telephone distance, they would probably put up concertina wire. Rich brats don’t play well in Legion halls.

Now, the Democrats are traditionally terrified of seeming Soft on Defense, and sometimes think they need to do something stupid but ferocious, so as not be come up a quart low on their virility dipstick. Webb, to put it mildly, in not vulnerable on this issue. He would provide an excuse for adult behavior.

I know Jim slightly, from days when I was on the military beat and he was Secretary of the Navy. In person he is not recognizable as a politician, which in any event for most of his life he wasn’t. No swagger, no show, no slime, not full of himself. If you talk, he listens. He isn’t always looking over your shoulder for a better name-tag. As best I can tell, he is incorruptible. This is a novel approach in politics, but I think the country can stand it. It’s worth the risk.

My own reasons for liking him? He resigned as SecNav after refusing to agree to a smaller fleet, and he insisted that Al Gray become Commandant of the Marine Corps.

I don't know about force requirements for the Navy in 1988 - but I had the feeling then that more was better. I do know that General Gray was the finest CMC we ever had.

My name is Robert Neville. I am a survivor living in New York City. I am broadcasting on all AM frequencies. I will be at the South Street Seaport everyday at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky. If you are out there... if anyone is out there... I can provide food, I can provide shelter, I can provide security. If there's anybody out there... anybody... please. You are not alone.

I refuse to believe I'm the only person in the world who has ever gotten it to fail this way. But it feels mighty lonely in here ...

In the desertI saw a creature, naked, bestial,Who, squatting upon the ground,Held his heart in his hands,And ate of it.I said, “Is it good, friend?”“It is bitter – bitter”, he answered,“But I like itBecause it is bitter,And because it is my heart.”

When I read this I had a twang in the ol' brain housing group: I've read that before.

Likely in high school, where the motto is "We'll pound literature into their pointy heads even though they will have no idea what it's really about." You can tell people about Big Ideas and that's a good thing - but unless they have some depth to their character - some experience - they won't really get what you're going on about.

I know that I, at least, had no idea what in the hell Crane was going on about when I was fifteen. I've knocked around a bit since then, seen the creature, chomping away and really getting into it. Yum, yum.

adia sez’ no brooklyn summer is gonna buy her a house, she’s walked down these streets in her breezy dresseswith her power jewelry on

she’s brought men to the honey pot and led them to dip their fingers in until dawn, as the dj spins the cuts on the horizon over fort greene park

smoke of grilled meat and mango incense rising, capoeiristas kick their heels in the dust. no indoors exists, no fluorescents. cars park on tree-lined streets, courage swollen in the hearts of every girl, every boy

in search of sweat and a slow wind before the end of the night

adia sez’ no brooklyn summer is gonna buy her a house - but this summer, i don’t want a house, not now, maybe not ever

i just want to feel his hands on my hips, basslines strumming the air like the wicked wings of city birds, i want to feel the crash of thunder and laughter leaping in my very throat.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

It's sixth period, my first day teaching high school, and my regular Junior English class refuses to settle down. I give them a brief talk, amid the jostling and visiting (and the walking, and the love taps, and the food trading, and the vaulting over desks) about respect. I will respect them, I say, and they will respect me.

If you're standing in front of a classroom, talking, and there is visiting, walking, food trading and (god help us) vaulting over desks you've already lost the 'respect me' skirmish. You need to retire your forces behind a water barrier and build up your strength for a counterattack. [2]

I am, at not even 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, the tiny center of a group growing rowdier by the second.

I wonder why.

One girl throws her weight around, muttering up and down the aisles about her grades and "this teacher." The class is listening to me at the board, so I decide to ignore the behavior and go on with my lesson.

Cue ominous music.

Between the girl bully and the boy bully, I feel so bad that the next day I am reluctant to give back graded work to any students. So bad that, in consultation with my chairman, I do not record zeros for make-up work that the girl bully has clearly had a fellow student complete for her. I just can't take the grief.

An adult. Is bullied. By children. That's all you really have to read to know the rest: Melanie Hubbard is bummed and burnt out and emotionally drained.

She has no idea that about 98% of it is her own fault.

Yes, her fault. I've seen a nice-as-apple-pie 5'2 lady gain the respect of thugs, creeps and gang-bangers - the kind of kids that 'Welcome Back, Kotter' could only hint at.

They sat, they hushed, they respected.

You can school almost any kid, if you do it right.

Arnold was a stoner.

[1] How you lik'n the musical reference?[2] I just finished reading 'A Bridge Too Far'. Awesome book but it will affect my power of metaphor composition for a while.

The cartoon above is the work of artist W. B. Park who lives in Altamonte Springs, Florida. Will Park is a friend of many years and his illustrations are throughout my book, Come Together Right Now. For years, while living and working in Orlando, Florida, I would regularly meet Will for lunch at various BBQ restaurants in the area and we’d sit and talk politics and try to make sense of our crazy country. Any leaflet or poster I needed artwork for he eagerly did.

You'll pardon my lack of manners but that cartoon - the thinking behind it - is a bunch of damned crap.

".. and with this Mars shot"

If the USAF was running the show that would be one thing. Last time I looked the organization that ran exploration was NASA, which is about a civilian organizations as you'll find.

".. our countries long history of military aggression, exploitation, dominance, and overkill."

For krep-heads - mostly in the US - the phrase 'The Marines have landed' inspires dread. For millions of others it means that help is on the way, your rice is being airlifted, your logistics are going to be unfucked, your wells are going to be redug.

If what we were all about is exploitation, dominance and overkill we'd own Japan and Germany and we'd have Imperial outposts from the Antarctic to Vladivostok. We wouldn't just leave when the host country says 'go'. We would have nuked the Soviet Union and people like Bruce would know what real oppression is like.